In 1985, Jacobs' father, Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, began championing a cellular technology that some experts wrote off as too complex to succeed commercially. A professor at Stanford University claimed the technology violated the laws of physics.

San Diego-based Qualcomm took that technology, called code division multiple access, and built it into an $11 billion business that employs more than 15,000 workers worldwide. Its chips or technology power many of today's wireless devices.

Paul and Irwin Jacobs will give a keynote address today at the CTIA Wireless trade show at the San Diego Convention Center. The joint appearance is rare these days. Irwin Jacobs stepped down as the company's chief executive in 2005 and retired as chairman of its board of directors this year.

Yesterday, they granted interviews to
The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Qualcomm's core technology had plenty of skeptics when the company was founded. “Everybody had 10 reasons why it wasn't going to work,” Irwin Jacobs said.

It almost didn't. Early on, Qualcomm invited telecommunications companies for a key demonstration of CDMA, but there was a glitch. Jacobs stalled, giving an hour-long speech while engineers frantically tried to solve the problem. In the end, they got it fixed.

“I often think back, if we didn't find it in that hour time period and get it working again, we would probably be out of business,” he said.

Besides CDMA, Irwin Jacobs also established an unusual business model at Qualcomm in hopes of giving the technology a better toehold in the market.

He licensed the technology to phone makers, collecting a royalty of about 5 percent on the wholesale price of phones.

When the company was small, the licenses weren't a big deal. Now that CDMA technology is a part of a lot of wireless phones, the licensing agreements have been contentious. Government agencies in South Korea and Japan have claimed parts of Qualcomm's license deals with phone makers violate unfair trade practice laws in those countries. Qualcomm is appealing the rulings.

“I think they're attacking the success more than anything else,” Irwin Jacobs said. “I can't comment on the legal stuff really. It has become a huge business. . . . The competitors talk to their governments and their governments come after us.”

With the rise of Web-enabled smart phones, the Internet has gone wireless, bringing more computing functions and consumer electronics functions to cell phones.

What's next for the industry is wireless capabilities embedded into a lot more devices, Paul Jacobs said.

“We've been talking about machine-to-machine communication, where your thermostat is networked,” he said. “But it's also displays that are going to be accessible — speakers, microphones, the light switches — everything around you is going to be wirelessly accessible. Not only that, but content will be available.”